Product Review: Codestylist

Code stylist is a very useful utility that formats your Visual Basic code into a much more readable form. It can align, indent and spell check very quickly and easily, leaving your project in one standardised format.

Code stylist hosts a huge number of options that the user can set. You can
split single line Dims and Const declarations into separate lines. It can also split
multiple statements which are separated by colons, and single line If statements.

It can indent many types of command including, If, Select Case, Do, For. It can indent
everything within the statement to a customisable level. It will also continue long lines,
using the line continuation character "_".

Code Stylist can format all the comments in the code, aligning them with
the other lines of code, separating off large blocks of comments, and even automatically
creating comments for Subs and Functions, which detail the author, date, arguments and
purpose. One special option is the possibility to spell check all comments and literal
strings. This works well, and it has picked up several typos that I had missed.

On top of the formatting which Code Stylist does, it also provides a couple of
not-so-useful utilities. You can analyse your project with the charting options. The
charts available include size of files, number of routines per module and percentage of
code that is comments. Another utility is the form tree browser, which loads up all the
controls on a form into a list box, and allows you to view the properties.

This utility is very useful for formatting code into a standard, readable
form, but it does include a couple of unnecessary features. However, more features is
better than less, and all in all ! think that this is well worth a look, particularly if
you publish or share your code.